Donald Trump is one of the most Twitter-obsessed freaks I’ve heard tell of, but he doesn’t quite seem to understand how the medium works.
But the most eye-popping revelation from Politico’s dive into Trump’s reading habits is his decidedly analog method for “liking” tweets. First, a quick reminder of the accepted method for liking tweets: Click the heart.
Now, Trump’s method for “liking” tweets:
The president has even been known to sends printouts of tweets he likes. After he liked one Gaetz tweet, he had it printed by a staffer, signed it and requested that it be sent to Gaetz’s congressional office, where the now-framed tweet hangs.
Recalling Trump’s past as a hotelier, Gaetz said, “This is the proverbial Trump gift basket waiting for you in your suite or sent to you.”
He’s like a caricature of an old, out-of-touch grandpa. This is not how any of this works.
It’s also deeply bizarre that someone would frame a tweet and hang it on their wall.
In other general fucking rich people news, wealthy parents are transferring responsibility (on paper) for their kids to their poorer friends.
Amid an intense national furor over the fairness of college admissions, the Education Department is looking into a tactic that has been used in some suburbs here, in which wealthy parents transfer legal guardianship of their college-bound children to relatives or friends so the teens can claim financial aid, say people familiar with the matter.
They give an example.
One Chicago-area woman told The Wall Street Journal that she transferred guardianship of her then 17-year-old daughter to her business partner last year. While her household income is greater than $250,000 a year, she said, she and her husband have spent about $600,000 putting several older children through college and have no equity in their home, which is valued at about $1.2 million, according to the property website Zillow. She said she has little cash on hand and little saved for her daughter’s education.
Transferring her daughter’s guardianship was largely a matter of paperwork, the mother said. Her business partner attended a court hearing with an attorney. She, her husband and her daughter didn’t even need to show up, she said. Once the guardianship was transferred, the teen only had to claim the $4,200 in income she earned through her summer job, the mother said.
Today, her daughter attends a private college on the West Coast which costs $65,000 in annual tuition, she said. The daughter received a $27,000 merit scholarship and an additional $20,000 in need-based aid, including a federal Pell grant, which she won’t have to pay back. The daughter is responsible for $18,000 a year, which her grandparents pay, the woman said.
Whoa. When my kids were starting college, I was making $40K/year, and we didn’t even own a home — we were renting. Yet we managed to scrimp and save and get all three kids through four years of college. So that family is bringing in a quarter million per year, and they haven’t managed to set aside any money for their kids’ education? What have they been spending their money on? That kid is getting $20K that could have gone to someone who really needed it. The woman openly admitted to robbing poorer people, and she’s probably proud of her cleverness.
Close those loopholes, and publicly shame the rich. That’s all we can do.